Greenwald gets his Pincus corrections

7/10/13 9:30 PM EDT

After a long, hard-fought campaign, The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald has finally forced The Washington Post's Walter Pincus to issue corrections on an article that raised questions about Edward Snowden's relationship with WikiLeaks.

Pincus, a veteran national security reporter, had suggested that Snowden may have taken a job at Booz Allen Hamilton in order to gather classified documents about the NSA's surveillance (Snowden has admitted as much himself) and that he may have been encouraged to do so by the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks.

In an open letter to Pincus published Tuesday morning, Greenwald said that argument was not only "grounded solely in baseless innuendo," but contained factual inaccuracies. In a follow-up article on Wednesday, Greenwald went to great lengths to show that Pincus had acknowledged these errors and promised to correct them, but that the Post had failed to do so.

Finally, on Wednesday night, the Post published the corrections at the top of Pincus's column. They are as follows:

CORRECTION: This Fine Print column (also published in the July 9 A-section print edition of The Washington Post) incorrectly said that an article by journalist Glenn Greenwald was written for the WikiLeaks Press blog. The article, about filmmaker Laura Poitras and WikiLeaks being targeted by U.S. officials, was written for the online publication Salon and first appeared April 8, 2012. Its appearance on the WikiLeaks Press blog two days later was a reposting.

The Fine Print column also asserted that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, during a May 29 interview with Democracy Now, “previewed” the story that Greenwald wrote for the Guardian newspaper about the Obama administration’s involvement in the collection of Americans’ phone records. There is no evidence that Assange had advance knowledge of the story; the assertion was based on a previously published interview in which Assange discussed an earlier surveillance project involving the collection of phone records.

The column also did not mention Snowden’s past work in the intelligence community. The lack of this context may have created the impression that Snowden’s work for Booz Allen Hamilton gave him his first access to classified surveillance programs.